Connection to Ouside Reading-Three Cups of Tea

Chapter 12-Haji Ali’s Lesson
Education was the most important thing in my family. My Grandmother would always say, “If you don’t go to college you will work for half price for the rest of your life.” I could never understand how people didn’t know how to read and write, especially as adults.
When I first walked into the Cohen Adult Literacy Center, the stereotypes were already there. I just knew that the people who could not read or write were either stupid, lazy or a combination of both. I never dreamed how far each of the students would be from this stereotype. I was stunned and floored by how smart each of my students were, how much they would teach me and how they would change the way I thought about the illiterate. There was the husband and wife team from China who were biomedical researchers at Vanderbilt University. There was the Vietnamise mother who had sacrificed her life and family to give her children an incredible opportunity. There was the man who was an Iraqi refugee. They were there because they were motivated. They were there because they wanted to learn. They were there because they recognized that people like me would judge them because they were not as fluent in English as I was. I was ashamed of the beliefs that I previously held and committed to changing my mind and helping to educate people about the struggles of non-English speakers in our country.
The idea of stereotypes brought me back to Chapter 12 in the book Three Cups of Tea. In this section, Haji Ali is telling Greg about the importance of learning from people who are different. He says, “We may be uneducated. But we are not stupid.” Mortensen follows up by saying, “We Americans think you have to accomplish everything quickly. We’re the country of thirty-minute power lunches and two-minute football drills. Our leaders thought their ‘shock and awe’ campaign could end the war in Iraq before it even started. Haji Ali taught me to share three cups of tea, to slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects. He taught me that I had more to learn from the people I work with than I could ever hope to teach them.”
We are never going to be able to move forward and change our world if we are unwilling or unable to change the way we think about people. By sitting down and just talking to my pupils, I was able to embrace a new way of thinking. They changed my perception about the state of literacy in our world. They allowed me to understand that education is not just how much you can read in an English book. It is about the mutual respect and growth that can come through meaningful conversation. For me, it was about changing my misguided views on the people who just needed someone to sit and talk to them so that they could change their own lives.